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It's Beginning to Hurt by James Lasdun

James Lasdun's stories often begin simply with a name and a place, but they are anything but parochial. Within a dozen pages, they create a world of objects and feelings that are rich, recognisable and yet elusive. People lie in bed worrying about death with a "cold pulsating wakefulness" held "in precarious abeyance" by pills, or contemplate the lost reality of what they might have done while regretting "the withheld trophies of the outer world". They find in music a second self "of fiery passionate vitality" or discover that sex isn't an answer but merely another, more confusing question.

There are bankers, furniture dealers, a self-employed forester, a former-hippie divorcée with a talent for sanctimonious martyrdom, an astronomer coping with academic redundancy, an assistant in a jewellery store and a womanising Scottish photographer full of preening selfesteem. A surgeon who bullies his younger son is one of several coercive husbands